Hearing the Writing on the Wall

March 12, 2025 | Tertulia x Hill Art Foundation | In Dialogue

The Writing’s on the Wall: Language and Silence in the Visual Arts | Curated by Hilton Als

Featuring: Hsin-Yun Huang, viola | James Austin Smith, oboe | David Kaplan, piano

I remember, in high school, sitting with a friend in the computer lab (remember the computer lab?), listening to composer Paul Hindemith’s clarinet sonata. Hindemith, recalling the clarinet's top-of-the-movement turn of phrase, allows the single treble voice to descend across a series of piano chords which, without the listener realizing, circle us from a harmonically distant world towards the home key - the tonic - and the conclusion of the movement. The friend, aware of my musical satisfaction at the compositional craft, broke the silence: “I wish I could hear what you hear”.

If the study of music is to learn, concurrently, a craft and a repertoire, the practice of music is, through performance, to offer a way into that repertoire, to allow our audience to know it more deeply, to be able to actually hear what we musicians hear. In his essay accompanying The Writing’s on the Wall: Language and Silence in the Visual Arts, curator Hilton Als writes, “To see, one must possess a language that directs the eyes to what is being perceived.” This evening’s program endeavors to extend that language to sound, to provide a kind of third dimension to the language - the art - of perception. 

The program begins where my eyes began: with Cy Tombly’s extraordinary squiggles hanging so nonchalantly in this beautiful space. Their reference to minimalism, specifically to the process-oriented origins of musical minimalism (the idea that the music, its expressivity, flows from the execution of a process), set me off on a search for a work that spoke to, that reflected, Twombly’s squiggles. Christopher Cerrone’s Passagework clicked, with its percussive ostinato around which, like Twombly, Cerrone manages, unexpectedly, to conjure hidden worlds.

Rachel Harrison’s Hermes 3000, with its vertical weight tethered by a mechanical marvel of language, recalled to me the inspiration, and the structure, behind Leilehua Lanzilotti’s musical telling of the story of Daphne, her escape, upwards, tugged ever downwards by a near-mechanical, 16th Century lament. 

I was immediately taken by the extraordinary layering in Ronny Quevedo’s Body and Soul (reflection eternal), hanging just behind the performance space, its weaving of drawing, collecting and architecture so deft as to distract from its intrinsic expression. Andrew Norman’s Sabina, slowly layering sound from foreign to ecstatic, depicts the composer’s experience watching the sunrise in the ancient Church of Santa Sabina in Rome, light through translucent stone, its patterns reflected across the interior, its complexity as a whole, arresting.

Today’s program is entitled A Way with Words - yes, an attempt to play in the verbal sandbox with a linguistic mind far more developed than mine, but also an attempt to address a program cut through with verbal inspiration, executed (if only slightly smugly) without any of the performers actually opening their mouths. From Andrew Norman’s Sonnets to Kati Agocs’ Vocalise on a Poem by Dylan Thomas, to Robert Schumann’s musical fairytales, his play on letters, his musical poetry, these composers have a way with words, and without them. Julius Eastman’s Piano 2 Solo II removes bar-lines - musical syntax - and invites the performer (and listener) to consider the role of silence in their interpretation of the sounds he proscribes. As Als reminds us, “Silence says so much - if you listen.”

Three works hang like specters over today’s program: to play any instrument underneath a canvas entitled Fluid Red Tone (Jennie C. Jones) is enough to recall musicians’ collective anxiety around producing as rich a sound as possible; Vija Celmins’ Pink Pearl Eraser taunts with endless re-writes otherwise known as practicing; Agnes Martin’s Untitled #20 hangs as a silent reminder that the score exists as we musicians understand and execute it - and equally - to the extent that we offer our audience a language that directs their ears to what is being perceived. Whether via our spoken words, our performances, or the works seen hanging around us, may this evening offer an opportunity to see a bit closer what these artists (and this exhibition’s curator) see, to hear a bit more of what we musicians hear. Thank you for joining us.

James Austin Smith

Special thanks this evening to Sarah Needham and the Hill Art Foundation for being such willing collaborators, to David Kaplan and Hsin-Yun Huang for their curatorial contributions to this evening’s program, to Yamaha for the use of one of their instruments, and to our inaugural audience for joining us.